Page 374 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

Cleanup after the Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa
THE CLEANUP BEGINS
Once the fire was contained, the massive cleanup effort began. Argonaut Construction was heavily involved, as were the Ghilotti’s and several other local contractors. “One day I got a call from Mike Smith Jr. asking for help,” says Nate King, of Ar- gonaut’s owner. “He wanted to line up as much equipment as possible in Coffey Park so the visit- ing general of the Army Corps of Engineers [re- sponsible for the bid] could see that the local con- tractors had plenty of resources and were ready to work. We pulled pretty much every new machine in our yard for Argonaut to pick up.” In the end, twenty-five excavators lined the side of the road into Coffey Park in an impressive show of force, to demonstrate that the locals could take care of their own. Out-of-towners landed numerous contracts, but locals got the lion’s share of the work.
FEMA and the Corps of Engineers used three primary disaster contractors to oversee the work— ECC (Burlingame, CA), Ashbritt (Florida), and Ceres (Florida)—with multiple subcontractors under them. “There were trucks here from ev- ery state in the nation,” says Smith. “It was crazy. Some contractors were taking too much dirt off the properties because they got paid by the ton. The local contractors didn’t do that. They live and work here. They know the people who lost their homes, so they respected everything and did a
372 | PETERSON: 85 YEARS AND GOING STRONG